Uncle Sam's Lodging House

Featured above is a political cartoon entitled "Uncle Sam's Lodging House" published around 1882. The cartoon depicts Uncle Sam holding his ears as an Irishmen either complains about his situation, demands rights or does something that made the petty bourgeois paranoid.

Second caption reads: "UNCLE SAM [to Irishman]: 'Look here, you, everybody else is quiet and peaceable, and you're all the time a-kicking up a row!'"

Sadly, this same kind of rhetoric is used unsuccessfully today against Latinos:

Puck's accompanying editorial was virulently anti-Irish: "the raw Irishman in America is a nuisance, his son a curse. They never assimilate; the second generation simply shows an intensification of all the bad qualities of the first. . . .They are a burden and a misery to this country." Further, Irish had corrupted our politics, lowered the standards of domestic service, and waged an "imbecilic and indecent war" against the English government. The time had come to clear the Irishman from Uncle Sam's lodging house, where all races and nationalities, except the Irish, got along with each other!

Once in a while I just like to go through old images like this one in order to remind myself that anti-immigrant efforts have always been historically unsuccessful in this nation and some of the very same decedents of people who were once persecuted because of their immigrant roots are now more than eager hold other people back.